There’s a great scene on Friends, the TV show, where Phoebe’s unpopular psychologist boyfriend tells the gang that the cookies they are eating aren’t love, they’re just cookies. He leaves and they hurl the cookies at the door. While that’s true, cookies aren’t love, some times they are a great substitute. When you’re depressed or sad food can be such a comfort. No wonder we have such an obesity problem with so many people on anti-depressants and the rest of us using cookies as a love substitute.

I tell you right now I could sure go for something. Not that life isn’t great. Compared to the way most of the world lives, I have it made. It’s just that even with the convenience, the wealth, the food, the shelter, the cars and cable TV, the leisure time, shopping malls – even with all that life can be hard. And when life is hard we need to eat. Eating helps.

I know this isn’t right. We should look deeper and find the root causes of our unhappiness and deal with them on that level. But who has that kind of time? Maybe some day I’ll have the opportunity for reflection and figure out why I tend to emotionally crash from time to time. Why some days there’s a itch that only a Big Mac can scratch. Oh, yes, now I see, it was a symptom of my early childhood memories dealing with the issues of subconscious repression and denial stemming from intergenerational reltaionships and the foregoing ….. Sheesh.